‘Charge the Cockpit or You Die’: Behind an Incendiary Case for Trump

“The Flight 93 Election,” an essay in The Claremont Review of Books, has stirred discussion among Trump supporters, anti-Trumpers and anti-anti-Trumpers.Credit
Brad Torchia for The New York Times

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — At most dinner galas, the presence of a Supreme Court justice would be reason enough to crow. But some of the 500 supporters of the Claremont Institute who gathered here on Feb. 11 to see Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. accept a statesmanship award also had the group’s links to an even more powerful eminence on their minds.

“Many Claremonsters have the ear of this administration and may help Trump take what he feels in his gut and migrate it to his head,” Thomas D. Klingenstein, the institute’s board chairman, declared from the stage, repurposing an old insult as a badge of honor.

“This is Claremont’s moment,” he continued. “This is a time to judge Claremont by its press. The more bad press, the better.”

Mr. Klingenstein was referring to the continuing furor around “The Flight 93 Election,” an incendiary pro-Trump polemic that appeared in September on the website of The Claremont Review of Books, the institute’s flagship publication. Published under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the essay compared the American republic to a hijacked airliner, with a vote for Donald J. Trump as the risky, but existentially necessary, course.

Decius’ apocalyptic vision — “Charge the cockpit or you die” — stirred intense rebuttals from the overwhelmingly anti-Trump conservative intellectual establishment. Then The Weekly Standard revealed that Decius was Michael Anton, a senior staff member at the National Security Council, and a news media stampede was on.

The Intercept called his writings the “intellectual source code of Trumpism.” Salon put him alongside Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller in the administration’s “white nationalist ‘genius bar,’” while the conservative writer (and staunch Never-Trumper) William Kristol, writing on Twitter, compared him to the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt.

It certainly added up to a publicity coup for a small West Coast institute known for summer seminars at which young conservatives immerse themselves in the Federalist Papers and other classics of American political thought. Suddenly, The Claremont Review, an erudite journal with a mere 13,000 subscribers, was being hailed as the bible of highbrow Trumpism — “crucially important,” as the journalist Damon Linker wrote, “for anyone seeking to understand the evolution of the Republican and conservative movement.”

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Charles R. Kesler, editor of The Claremont Review of Books, compared the essay to Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.”Credit
Brad Torchia for The New York Times

Not that the journal is pro-Trump, mind you. Charles R. Kesler, the editor, said that he had sought out “robust debate,” publishing some Never-Trumpers alongside pro-Trumpers and those who call themselves “anti-anti-Trump.”

The institute’s president and chief executive, Michael Pack, also noted that Claremont’s affiliates — who include the former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo (a strong Trump critic) and Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas (“one of Trumpism’s leading voices,” as a headline in The Washington Post recently put it) — were of many minds about the new president.

“The Claremont Institute stands for deep, serious thinking about American founding principles,” Mr. Pack said. “We are not simply in the partisan fight.”

But some Claremont-watchers take a darker view, saying the institute’s intellectual principles have been, to continue the aviation metaphor, left on the runway.

“They have completely abandoned every principle on which they stood and have endorsed a man who seems to have no interest in or knowledge of the Constitution,” Steven B. Smith, a political science professor at Yale, said. “Even though Trump may be completely unhinged, the idea is they can nevertheless kind of slipstream behind him and smuggle their agenda in.”

From Leo Strauss to the Beach Boys

The Claremont mission, according to the institute’s website, is to “defeat progressivism” and “restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, pre-eminent place in American life.”

But Mr. Kesler’s office on the manicured campus of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., where he is a professor of government, could not seem more distant from the corridors of power, let alone the chaos of actually existing Trumpism. (The institute, founded in 1979, is not affiliated with the college.)

The décor is standard-issue professor, down to the desk piled with books relating to American political thought, including his own edition of the Federalist Papers — the top-selling edition in the country, he noted — and an anthology of Woodrow Wilson’s political writings.

Wilson, as it happens, is a favorite Claremont bête noire: the founder of the modern “administrative state,” the unelected, unaccountable rule-by-bureaucracy that has, the story goes, usurped the founders’ vision of rule by the people (and which reached its apogee with Barack Obama, Mr. Kesler argued in his 2012 book, “I Am the Change”).

He takes a similarly cheerful view of the ruckus over the essay. He brought up Mr. Kristol’s “intemperate” tweet, but noted that his old friend had recently come to the college for a conference about an essay by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.

“A secret Straussian conclave!” Mr. Kesler said with a laugh, then paused. “Don’t call it that.”

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Strauss’s intensely close readings of Plato, Maimonides and Machiavelli can seem remote from contemporary politics. But during the Bush administration, much ink was spilled over the subterranean influence of Straussians like Mr. Kristol, who championed the war in Iraq. And now some see the Claremont crowd’s rising profile as revenge of the so-called West Coast Straussians, as acolytes of Harry V. Jaffa — the Claremont McKenna professor and Claremont Institute patriarch who died in 2015 — are known.

The Straussian lineages, and their fierce schisms, are notoriously complex. But Mr. Kesler, who studied under the Straussian Harvey C. Mansfield at Harvard but came to Claremont in 1983, gamely summed up the West Coast view as hinging on a more optimistic take on America.

“The East Coast view was that America was a Lockean nation, purely modern, based on radically individual and almost selfish rights: your life, your liberty, your property,” he said.

But Mr. Jaffa, a deep student of Abraham Lincoln, “thought that America was a heroic country,” Mr. Kesler continued. “Not always, maybe only when it had to be. But it could be.”

The tension between Athens (reason) and Jerusalem (faith) was one of Strauss’s great themes. But reconciling Athens and Mar-a-Lago may be a challenge of an entirely different order.

Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled with amusement a dinner last summer with a dozen Claremonters at a Philadelphia restaurant famous for singing waiters, where he was startled to realize that many of his Aristotle-quoting tablemates were pro-Trump.

“Between arias, I had to listen to these very distinguished scholars go on about the great intellectual virtues of Donald Trump,” he said. “It was hard to keep down my wonderful Sicilian meal.”

Polemics like “The Flight 93 Election” represent something of a departure for The Claremont Review, founded in 2000 as a conservative, if eclectic, answer to The New York Review of Books. Previous contributions by Mr. Anton, a former Jaffa student, include meditations on French cooking, several articles about Tom Wolfe and perhaps the only essay on the Beach Boys to cite both Brian Wilson and the social scientist James Q. Wilson.

When Mr. Anton submitted an earlier essay written as Decius, Mr. Kesler rejected it. “It wasn’t as well argued as I would have liked,” he said. (It was published in March, under the title “Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism,” by The Journal of American Greatness, a website that has since closed and been reborn as American Greatness.)

Decius’ main target in the “Flight 93” essay was the fat-and-happy conservative establishment — Conservatism Inc. — which had failed to stand up to “the ceaseless importation of third world foreigners,” among other ills. Mr. Kesler said that he found the tone of apocalyptic urgency exaggerated but compared the essay to the clarion call of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.”

“Anton was trying to wake people up, and he did,” Mr. Kesler said. “I was very happy to publish it. But I was also happy to publish others who added some caveats.”

Anti-Anti-Trump or Pro-Trump?

“The Flight 93 Election” included some jabs at Mr. Kesler’s more cautious anti-anti-Trump position. Since then, he has moved in a more clearly pro- direction.

In an essay in the latest issue of The Claremont Review, Mr. Kesler calls Mr. Trump a “common-sense conservative” whose views on trade, immigration and foreign policy represent a return to the pre-New Deal Republican Party — more Calvin Coolidge 2.0 than the tyrannical Caesar “The Federalist Papers” warned against.

Mr. Trump lacks a tyrant’s “dark political soul,” Mr. Kesler said. “He’s more of a bull in a china shop.”

And what about charges that the bull is trampling the Constitution? Mr. Kesler offered a perspective that was half wait-and-see, half told-you-so.

“It’s always amusing but heartening to hear liberals talk about the separation of powers, the independent judiciary and other inhibitions on executive action,” he said. “When you’re the out-party, you discover the utility of these constitutional protections.”

“Of course,” he added, “I’d be happier if they discovered not just their utility but their nobility as well.”

Correction: March 9, 2017

An article on Feb. 21 about the Claremont Institute described incorrectly an event at which Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. accepted a statesmanship award. It was a dinner gala, not a fund-raising gala. The article also misidentified the position Thomas D. Klingenstein holds with the institute. He is the chairman of the board, not the president.

A version of this article appears in print on February 21, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Charge the Cockpit or You Die’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe